Sunday, 10 March 2013

"Quietways": If you want to know what Boris's cycling plans for London look like, take a look at what's rolling out right now in Camden, Hackney and the City of London. There's going to be a lot more of these sorts of streets coming soon.

I've cycled around Fitzrovia a lot recently and been hugely impressed by the work Camden has rolled out. The area takes up most of the block north of Oxford Street and west of Tottenham Court Road, as far as Great Portland Street, where car domination courtesy of Westminster council kicks in. Across the entire zone, the council employed a number of strategies:

It has removed several traffic lights and replaced these with zebra crossings on speed tables. This makes it easier for motor vehicles to get through without constant stop-starting. And it makes it easier to cross the road as the cars are going more slowly and you don't have to wait for a green man to cross the road.

Former car parking, now bike parking in Fitzrovia

It has installed bike parking throughout the area, replacing a handful of car parking spaces with dozens of bike parking spaces. (Meanwhile, neighbouring Westminster says it can't find space for bike parking. On exactly the same streets)

It has turned a maze of one-way streets into streets that are almost all two-way for cycling.

And last week, it closed Warren Street to motor vehicles to stop taxis and minicabs using the street as a ratrun to avoid the junction at the top of Tottenham Court Road.

Fitzrovia is not now a car-free nirvana. But compared to 10 years ago, the place has changed hugely. When you cycle through most of the streets here, you now feel like you're on equal status with motor cars. Not on every street, but on a serious slice of them. Frankly, it's quite uplifting to cycle here knowing that you're no longer the underdog on the streets.

Tellingly, this is exactly the same sort of thinking that is now emerging in Boris Johnson's cycling vision for London, where his cycling commissioner Andrew Gilligan describes the network of Quietways planned between neighbourhoods all around London. In that document he promotes the Hackney model as one to watch:

Boris's document slightly misses the point that this strategy isn't just about cycling. It's about creating a better neighbourhood for everyone. Bye bye to unnecessary traffic lights, hullo to calmer streets and less rat-run traffic. If you link streets like this together, you end up with a really useful cycling network. For example, Hackney's Pitfield Street route takes you the whole way from behind Moorgate in the City of London all the way to Dalston on streets that have been made calmer and easier to cycle on than anything I can think of in west or south London.

Even the City of London is catching up with this same model. Earlier this month, the City shut Stonecutter Street in the heart of the Square Mile. Or rather, it didn't shut the street. It just blocked the street to rat-running motor vehicles.

The City is making a sizeable number of its one-way streets bi-directional for cycling or pedestrian and cyclist only. Again, similar to Hackney. What the City isn't doing yet with quite the same success is linking those streets up so that they become a network, like the Dalston to Moorgate link that Hackney has built along Pitfield Street. That needs to happen.

Compare and contrast. This is Westminster council's mainbike route through Covent Garden. A complete and utter joke. All the more so when you compare with the City of London or Camden council's equivalents

The City of London and the City of Westminster are both crucial to the future of cycling in London. Because once you arrive at Moorgate, you shouldn't be dumped into car-choked race tracks and left to fight it out on your own. You should expect a similar quality of cycling experience from end-to-end. And that needs the boroughs to play nicely with each other and with Transport for London.

I have to hope that Andrew Gilligan will focus minds in the boroughs and encourage them to build a network of routes that maintain a similar quality from end to end, regardless of which borough they're in and regardless of main roads which get in the way.